Hey, look, someone being a douche to retail workers

I love me some Cracked.com. Or at least, I did, until I read this super douchey shitstain article:

Five Ways You Suck At Customer Service Without Realizing It

Feel free to read the whole thing, and slowly seep up the insulting terribleness.

I was all, "Yay! A retail article!" and then about two seconds in I was like, "Aw, hells no." And then I started ranting about it in my head, and now I am putting those rants into words on my computer, and now I will post them on my blog.

You're welcome.

I guess in the interest of fairness I should say that I've never had what could be described as a "bad customer service" experience, but then, most of the stories in the article register as neutral at worst. I mean, how is a stock guy putting new stock on the shelves a customer service disaster? (#2.) Are there really people out there that fill with an impotent rage when they have to move past someone putting new stock on shelves? Is that really a thing?

Thanks to this list, I'm more wary of customers than ever.


#5. "I do my job and not one iota more."


With regards to some guy who gets mad when you tell him that dog food is in the pet aisle:

So where you're thinking that you gave a completely correct, concise answer, he sees you as another young punk who wouldn't stop mopping for three seconds to be a little more helpful, because of an, "I do exactly what I'm paid to do and no more" attitude.

If the answer wasn't specific enough, why wouldn't you just ask him to clarify? Customer service people aren't mind readers.

In regards to the mopping, yes, most retail workers have a ridiculous laundry list of responsibilities, and are forced to do double duty between customer service and maintenance. Guess which one is more important to their job security? (It's not customer service.) Of course, the other option is that you're talking to a literal maintenance guy, in which case he knows fuck all about where the shit you're looking for is. Not everyone working in a store at all times is a customer service representative.

As far as the "I do exactly what I'm paid to do and no more" attitude, in many situations, that's the only way to stay sane in retail. If we lived in some sort of magical meritocracy where hard workers are rewarded for their hard work, then yeah, work harder. As it is, we live in a world where companies fuck with recorded hours to make sure no one gets paid overtime, promotions are unheard of and upper management are always outside hires, hours are cut capriciously or capped to make sure no one gets full-time benefits, salaried employees are forced to work dozens of hours of unpaid overtime each month to make up for the hours cuts, and corporate will find any excuse not to give out raises. At my old retail job, no one in the district got an evaluation for two years, let alone a raise, because they were constantly shuffling district managers around. At my current retail job, upper management is constantly shifting the goalposts to justify giving everyone an "average" rating and a minimum raise. "Well, you're doing great at the thing we dinged you on at last year's evaluation, but now we only care about something else, so, fuck you."  


#4. "Hope is a lie- Sorrow is my only companion."

First, I know that being cheerful and energetic is way, way harder for some people than for others. But people aren't expecting you to be an ambassador for humanity, they just don't want to walk away from your encounter feeling like they may have been the last straw that pushed you into clinical depression.

I do have clinical depression, first of all. So, there's that. Maybe get over the idea that some stranger's mood has anything to do with you? Also, auditing other people's emotions is a major dick move.

 It creeps me out so much that sometimes if I walk in to either establishment and see that they're the only cashiers working, I'll turn around and walk back out without buying anything at all, even if I desperately needed what I came for.

Anyone who's willing to majorly inconvenience themselves because some minimum wage worker wasn't smiley enough has issues that I'm not qualified to examine. The funny thing is, I hear equally as many complaints about how fake retail workers and salespeople are.

You either get fake enthusiasm, or genuine apathy.

 And please, don't come back with, "It's minimum wage, what do you expect?" Minimum wage isn't nothing -- when a minimum wage job opens up, 30 applications come in.

Thirty? Try hundreds. Regardless, even if you manage to hire a good one, it's only a matter of time until the good employees realize that they're always going to be making the same amount of money as the bad employees, and they give up on trying. (See: #5.) 


#3. "How was my day? Well, funny you should ask..."


This is a customer issue. At my job, we have multiple grandma-mom-daughter trios who come in to buy video games and tell us at length about their ongoing custody battles with their deadbeat baby daddies. I didn't realize we had more than one of those until I had the following conversation with ladyboss:

"So, my favorite grandma-mom-daughter trio who come in to tell us at length about their ongoing custody battle with the deadbeat baby daddy were here today."

"You mean Alimony Chick?"

"Oh, no, the other one."

Lots of people, maybe especially nerds, are lonely and isolated, so when they see someone who's nice to them, they latch on. It doesn't matter that you're forced to be nice to them. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy talking to our regulars (some of whom read THIS VERY BLOG!), but if I've never seen you before and you want me to give you dating advice, well, that's weird.

Then we finally get to some prime evidence that the writer is a raging douchebag:

Four or five years ago, I took on a massive amount of overtime at my previous job so I could buy my kids some really nice Christmas gifts, because up until that point, I had never had that opportunity. I had to work a few 80-hour weeks at a strenuous physical labor job to do it, but we were able to buy about $1500 worth of toys and gadgets. I was pretty proud of myself. When we got to the checkout line, the girl behind the register started asking us straight-up, "I don't get how people can afford stuff like this. How do you do it? How much money do you make a year?"

She went on to tell us about how she wasn't sure how she was going to afford Christmas for her own kids, and then I sort of just blacked out.

Really? Is it so hard to imagine that some poverty-ridden cashier would snap after the thousandth time she had to watch some asshole spend over a thousand dollars on toys? Good for you for working 80-hour weeks, I guess, which you were only able to do because you had someone available to watch your kids- a privilege that may not be shared by this woman.

I've been known to crack under the pressure of being nice to people who are making my life hell. Like the time I had to work a full day during an escalated snow emergency. I may have pointed out that I risked my life to dig out my shitty old Saturn, come to the store, and take their stupid return.

A few times.


#2. "Can you not see that I'm busy!?"

 Not much will piss me off more when I'm shopping than a stocker who won't get the fuck out of the way. I'm not talking about minor little occurrences where you can easily just reach around them and say, "Pardon me." I'm talking about when you say that, they look you directly in the eyes to acknowledge that you're there, and continue to work. Because their boss said, "Stock this shit," and, by God, that's exactly what they're going to do. They'll be damned if they let annoying setbacks like customers get in their way.

Oh, fuck you. Fuck you right in your stupid fucking article.

Stock people are not customer service representatives, so what are they even doing on this list? If you want one of the things being stocked, why wouldn't you just ask for it? Weren't you just complaining about customer service people not being articulate enough in #5? Last I checked, "pardon me" doesn't mean "can I have one of those."

I'm getting the impression that this guy's bizarre aversion to talking to store employees is what's causing all these problems for him. Maybe try asking for help when you need it.

 I guess the key is remembering that as the employee, it's actually your job to be invisible and out of the way, where the customer has no obligation whatsoever to make stocking easier for you.

Wait, employees are supposed to be invisible? Awesome! I'll be hiding in the back room from now on.

After all, the store doesn't exist to keep the shit on the shelves, it exists to get it into the carts of customers -- so it's not so much learning to embrace each customer as the precious child of God that they are, but just recognizing that the customer's role is literally to fuck up your stack of cans. When customers ruin your schedule by buying things, the system is actually working perfectly.

This article is actually getting less sensible as it goes on. I mean, at first it was all "crotchety guy with poor social skills," but it's getting more and more to "I hate the concept of a store." If you hate the idea that stores have to fill shelves to move product, and you hate the idea of talking to customer service people, but you also hate the idea of being ignored by customer service people, why don't you try, I don't know, shopping online? Did you know that you can buy anything you want, from the comfort of your own home? I mean, you obviously have an internet connection.

Seriously, you won't be missed.

He hasn't gone off the deep end yet, though:


#1. "Would you like to buy every service we offer?"


This has... literally nothing to do with the customer service employee. At all. He even says as much:

You didn't do anything wrong. It's not your fault. It's the company's fault. I have no advice here -- if you run through the offers quickly, then it sounds like you're being terse and rushing them along. If you go slower and really try to sell them on the benefits, you're wasting their time. You can't roll your eyes and say, "I know this is annoying, just bear with me," because they'll fire your ass. There is no perfect way to do it, because what you're being asked to do is annoying as shit.

Every store has a loyalty program. Not signing up is as easy as saying "no thanks." It's hardly the raging inconvenience that people make it out to be. Even Amazon is constantly bugging you to sign up for their Prime service, but I guess that's ok, because being forced to say the words "no thanks" is physically way more strenuous than clicking past something, or whatever.

Of course, lest we think the douchery is over, he ends the article with the douche cherry on the douche sundae:

But having the right attitude while working customer service can win you life's ultimate prize: the right to not have to work in customer service any more.

Really, bro?

Nobody has the "right" to work or not work anywhere. A job is just a job. You perform a task, they give you money, you get to stay alive a little bit longer. Sure, there are people out there who work customer service because they love customer service. There are also people who work customer service because they have to to keep themselves and their families housed and fed, and that's all that was available. Not everyone has a great education, or lives in an area with better-paying union labor jobs.

(Incidentally, being great at retail only qualifies you to work more retail, so this idea that being great at customer service will somehow win you the "right" to have a quiet office job is missing a few links in the chain.)

Finally, for your own benefit, my loyal reading public, let me tell you what the real issue causing all these customer service horrors is.

People are cheap.

With the rise of Wal-Mart and other big box retailers, people were forced to make a choice between customer service and low prices. People chose low prices. Low prices have costs in other places, like shoddy products, exploitative factory conditions, and- wait for it- understaffed stores. Next time you're waiting in line at the one open register at Wal-Mart, cursing and wondering why they don't open more lanes, remember the answer:

They would have to hire and pay more employees, and they don't want to.

They know you'll keep coming to shop at Wal-Mart no matter how terrible it is, because when it comes down to it, you only care about price.

CUSTOMER SERVICE IS DEAD, AND YOU KILLED IT.

But seriously, if you're just going to come into a store and complain about everything, do us all a favor and shop on Amazon instead. For reals.